Organogelators (oil gelators) are used in the fields of cosmetics, pharmaceutical products, agrochemicals, foods, adhesives, paints, resins, and similar products to control the flowabilities of the products. Such a gelator can solidify organic solvents and domestic oil wastes, which cause environmental pollution, for recovery. In addition, organogels produced by such a gelator can be used as chemomechanical system materials, impact/vibration absorbers, materials for imparting sustained-release properties to pharmaceutical products, and the like, and thus the organogelators have been drawing attention. The gelators have been studied and developed mainly on polymer compounds, but in recent years, low-molecular weight compounds, which have excellent characteristics as gelators, have been being studied. Organogels formed from such a gelator are required to have appropriate strength, transparency, and continuous sol-gel conversion properties (thixotropic properties) depending on use thereof.
As described above, the organogels have been used in a wide variety of fields and are expected to be used in wider fields in future. On this account, as the application fields of the organogels expand, organogelators of low-molecular weight compounds (hereinafter also called low-molecular weight gelators) are required to have the ability to form a gel from a wide variety of organic solvents. To address these requirements, urea compounds (for example, Patent Documents 1 to 3) and amide compounds (for example, Non-Patent Document 1) are described as low-molecular weight gelators capable of forming a gel having excellent stability from various organic solvents by adding a small amount of such a compound. It is also described that an α-aminolactam derivative has the ability to form gels from squalane, a liquid paraffin, and the like (for example, Patent Document 4). However, these compounds alone fail to provide sufficient mechanical strength, thixotropic properties, or the like. Use of acrylamide is described as an amide gel capable of providing mechanical strength, but the production of such a gel necessitates polymerization reaction, and thus is complicated (for example, Patent Document 5). For a gel that is formed from an organogelator comprising a single compound but had insufficient performances, a described case can solve such a disadvantage by mixing a plurality of compounds (Patent Document 6). However, there are innumerable combinations of the compounds and the usage thereof, and the determination of the optimal combination requires much effort.